Medical providers have been faced with the harsh reality of reduced time with direct patient care. The transition has been gradual, with documentation and clerical requirements supplanting time spent on history and physical exam. The current paradigm dictates that if it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen. Also, without adequate documentation, getting paid for your [...]
Old habits are hard to break. Whether it be something as serious as quitting smoking, something less serious like biting our nails, or something seemingly easy like cutting down on junk food, habits are ingrained in the way we live our lives, so breaking them – stopping them altogether, or adjusting the way we [...]
One of the most frequent complaints from practicing physicians is the erosion over the past 20 years of time spent with patients. Direct patient care now only accounts for 30% of total provider time. So, what’s the other 70%? Charting and clerical work. And for the doctors rounding at multiple facilities, throw in driving [...]
Uncertainty has become the new reality. America and the world are struggling to cope with the impact of an infectious pandemic. All aspects of normal life have been affected, forcing us to take hard looks at behaviors that were previously felt to be innocuous. As a practicing physician, I recognize the challenge of providing [...]
Mobile charge capture has become a popular tool to improve physician efficiency when rounding on hospitalized patients. Allowing doctors to submit charges at the point-of-care eliminates the need to carry around billing sheets and encourages timely submission of charges. This has led to improved charge accuracy and increases in revenue due to reductions in [...]
I spent several years working as a Medical Assistant in a Cardiology clinic. It was interesting and rewarding work, but it had its challenges. One of the biggest was keeping the doctors on schedule as much as possible. One electrophysiologist who I worked with on occasion was so notoriously talkative that we developed a [...]
Effective healthcare is a team sport, and that requires communication. Texting is an excellent way to communicate, particularly when the team is busy and on-the-go. Rather than chasing each other to find a moment to connect, team members can reply when they have the time. Texting in healthcare presents unique security challenges, however. Patient [...]
Effective healthcare delivery requires an extraordinary amount of coordination, often involving multiple facilities and platforms. With everyone moving in different directions, it’s critical to have an easy way to communicate that’s also safe and HIPAA compliant. Secure messaging can help your practice accomplish this task, and we’ll break down some of the most common [...]
When the subject of HIPAA violations comes up, it can be easy to focus on the most egregious violations. Consider former UCLA cardiothoracic surgeon Huping Zhou, who was fired from his job and proceeded to illegally access the medical record over three hundred times. He accessed the records of co-workers, including his boss, and [...]
As of January 1, 2020, Medicare will not accept claims unless they are submitted with an MBI. MBIs are the new Medicare patient ID numbers. MBI stands for Medicare Beneficiary Identifier. These numbers are replacing Health Insurance Claim Numbers (HICNs), which were most commonly social security numbers. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [...]
